Playing Character Animations backwards

I am trying to play a character animation backwards. I have a animation that i call in script code using the playCelAnimation() function. This function then calls setActionThread(). There is no direction in this function to specify if you want to play the animation backwards. I modified the code to take a direction being a bool and pass that into the engine. I have ran debug and varified that it gets passed in and setActionThread() in the c++ code uses it. I even went all the way in to see that it sets the first frame of the animation as the last frame of the animation and visa versa to set it to be backwards.

Now comes the problem. It does nothing! I cant debug any further b/c the code is setting some threads up and if i try to set a break point in some animation code I always break b/c of the character idle/run/walk/etc animations. Can anyone help on me getting animations to play backwards?

Thanks!